


tear our pleasures with rough strife

by soaringrachel



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Erotic murder, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:21:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25374580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soaringrachel/pseuds/soaringrachel
Summary: They kill each other, many times.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 15
Kudos: 376





	tear our pleasures with rough strife

**Author's Note:**

> As per the tags content warning for, uh, erotic murder! We're getting HORNY for DEATH here. (M rating/no archive warnings because no one STAYS dead and I don't think the violence or the sex is that graphic, but it's all there.)
> 
> Title from "To His Coy Mistress"; cliche it may be but Joe and Nicky certainly have world enough, and time.

“I don’t want to kill you,” the soldier says, in ungraceful Italian.

It’s an obvious lie.

It would be an obvious lie even if Nicco hadn’t woken up gasping half the nights since Trieste, aching with this man’s desire to kill him; an obvious lie even if the man’s hand wasn’t caressing the pommel at his hip without the apparent input of his mind; an obvious lie even if Nicco’s own blood weren’t hot with how much he wants to do the same in return.

The firelight isn’t much use, this far from the center of camp, but Nicco hardly needs it to know this man’s face; he could practically sketch each eyelash from memory. He breathes in deeply; the air smells of horses and men.

“Don’t lie,” Nicco says.  _ Not to me _ , he doesn’t.

The man shrugs, as fluidly as he does everything (Nicco knows, though they’ve never met), and he’s right--this truth is too obvious to bother speaking. Nicco wishes for his own knife, back in his tent, but he’s almost glad this will be down to teeth and fists for him, now that it’s happening. He wants to feel this man’s throat.

“I’ll be missed soon,” he says, softly, and takes a half-step forward--

It’s fast from there, fast and wonderful, skin and blood, rough wool and cold metal. The man mutters in Arabic, as he gets his knife against a vein; whispers in Italian, as Nicco reaches up to strangle him, “I don’t want this to be over.”

When Nicco wakes it’s just before dawn and the man isn’t there. He isn’t, somehow, in Hell, but there’s both their blood giving his hands the look of a demon’s. He licks at it before thinking, breathes dry air. For the first time since Trieste he feels satisfied, and then he realizes if the soldier isn’t here, he isn’t dead, and he yearns as much as ever.

Yusuf keeps dreaming about the Christian after he kills him, but it isn’t the same. These are ordinary dreams, dreams where Yusuf is a bird landing in a sea that turns out to be the man’s mouth, dreams where the man and his mother work in her herb garden. Dreams where Yusuf thrusts into the man and bites at his shoulder from behind. But not true dreams like before.

He kills other men, of course. He shoots a man in battle who turns out to be a boy of fourteen; he helps the doctor to put a screaming patient out of his misery; he goes on a stealth mission and rids them of an enemy commander. This, too, is ordinary. Killing that man was not ordinary. 

Being killed by him was not, either. This is now the third time Yusuf has been killed, and neither of the first two felt like that. After the second time he’d become reckless in battle, uncaring. Now he is more cautious than ever. He does not want anyone else to kill him, not after that man.

After three weeks, he has the other true dream again; the women, speaking a language he doesn’t know. In the dream one woman slides a leg between the other’s, leans forward and bites at her lip--Yusuf wrenches himself awake. It’s dawn, and he dresses, washes, walks out farther than he should, shaking the dream out of himself. He’s nearly ready to turn back when he sees the Christian again.

He tries to tell himself it must be the man’s brother, but it’s feeble--Yusuf has seen the man’s face too many times to mistake it. And Yusuf knows better than to assume someone left lying dead will stay that way. He wants to rush at the man, tear his eyes out, scratch his chest--he wants to stand still as death and wait to see if the man rushes at him.

He does neither. He walks slowly toward the man, unarmed, apparently not dangerous.

The man raises a bow and hits him right between the eyes.

Nicco waited long enough, the second time, to see the man rise from the dead; he needed the proof, that rising from the dead was in fact what they had both done before. He needed that, and he wanted to see the man for longer, wanted to make sure he remembered the length of those eyelashes and the curve of his shoulder.

Because, he soon realizes, now that the dreams have stopped the only way he has to see the man is to kill him.

He volunteers for spy missions, again and again, until his commander stops asking for volunteers and just sends him unasked. He moves across the terrain of battle; the first few times, he is conscientious, completes his objective before he goes looking, gathers the intelligence and performs the assassination he is supposed to before he goes to indulge in the one he wants to.

He does gather intelligence; the man’s name, for instance. He whispers it, the next time he kills him after he learns it. It’s a close kill, that one, so he whispers it in his ear, and Yusuf is startled enough that that time Nicco comes away alive. The next time he’s shot before he even spots Yusuf, and by the time the other man walks over he’s too weak to return the favor; Yusuf kneels down beside what’s about to be his body and whispers “Nicolo,” before he stalks away.

After that he stops worrying so much about the missions.

He keeps performing them, occasionally, often enough to get more of them. But he’s spending more than half his time behind enemy lines, and he can tell his commander thinks he’s become a double agent; the missions he’s sent on now feel pointless, make-work. A few times he does consider turning traitor, just to purge the ridiculousness. But of course he doesn’t, because he couldn’t keep killing Yusuf, and this has rapidly become the only thing that matters.

Not the only thing. Yusuf kills him just as often, of course. More often, probably, though he loses count fairly quickly; the other man is more skilled as a soldier, certainly, and he wants it no less. The kills are always close, now, because Yusuf doesn’t seem able to resist repeating  _ Nicolo, Nicolo, Nicolo _ while he drives the knife in and Nicco doesn’t want him to any more than he wants to stop muttering  _ Yusuf _ with his last half a breath while he brings home the poison dart concealed in his palm.

He stops sleeping in camp altogether, only half because he keeps waking up hard and panting from vague dreams of Yusuf’s hands and rough cheek; then he stops coming back at all. It means they’ll kill him if they see him, he knows, for desertion, but it’s not as if he minds. Next to Yusuf with a strong arm across his chest and a blade kissing his throat, what they call killing is a gnat bite, a desert sunburn. Next to tracking Yusuf down when they’ve been teasing each other, on a chase for days on end, avoiding the scouts is brushing off an annoying child.

He can’t call it compulsion anymore, really--it’s obsession, certainly, but it’s a chosen obsession. It’s no longer about the dark eyes he dreamed of, much as they still draw him in. What keeps Nicco coming back is the man himself--the graceful way he moves a knife from one hand to the other, the playfulness of how he evades Nicco when they let the hunt draw out, the way for all that he’s serious, respectful, in the moment of death. If it were another man who couldn’t die, Nicco thinks, he would still be on the battlefield, catching an occasional glimpse of the other who kept getting up after being run through. Because it’s Yusuf, he’s left everything behind.

In the end Yusuf can only kiss him when he’s dead.

He knows he wants to, desperately. He loves their game but he tires of it--after so many they’ve lost count the kills no longer feel like culmination but another frustrating whisper of what they’re really after. He can see it in Nicolo’s eyes too, that he’s killing Yusuf because it’s the only way he knows to be close to him, and oh, Yusuf is  _ aching _ to show him a few other ways.

But this man--Yusuf has more than a suspicion this man will be the rest of his life, and more than a suspicion, at this point, that that means very long indeed. So he has to move carefully.

His touches get softer, almost despite himself, even still keeping up the pretense of enmity. He caresses the other man, really, and he speaks more, clumsy language he picked up from prisoners of war getting more fluid until he longs to talk with Nicolo until his voice grows hoarse instead of dreading it. He knows everything about this man, he can follow his every movement sharper than a mirror and almost before he makes them, but he knows nothing about him, whether he’s the eldest brother or the youngest, if he comes from a city or a village, if he came to war by choice or with reluctance. He feels at once that he has all the time in the world to find out and that he has to know immediately.

But that first move, that first touch that changes them from this into something else--he can’t do it. He wants to believe it’s tact but it’s terror, all the terror he no longer feels of death transmuted into a fear of beginning his next life. 

So he kills Nicolo, and he kills Nicolo, and then he sees Nicolo lying dead at his feet and the enormity of it, the enormity of him, outweighs the terror at last, and he almost without meaning to leans down to Nicolo’s too-red mouth and kisses it finally.

Nicolo tastes of blood and sweat, and faintly of dates he must have eaten for breakfast before Yusuf caught him washing his shirt in a stream. He’s too newly dead to be cold, but he nevertheless gets warmer as Yusuf kisses him, warmer in a way that Yusuf in oblivion assumes is his own body heat between them until, of course, he realizes too late that Nicolo has come awake, flushed and almost feverish, bare-chested beneath Yusuf and pinned by his mouth.

They are absolutely still for a long moment, Yusuf unable to bring himself to move forward but equally incapable of retreat. They are absolutely still, and then Nicolo’s hand is tight in Yusuf’s hair, his thigh is shoving up between Yusuf’s legs above him, he is kissing Yusuf like he wants to eat him, like this is the simply the one method of destruction they haven’t tried.

Yusuf groans, deep and swallowed into Nicolo’s mouth, and comes up flush against him now; he’s in only a thin shirt himself and he can feel the heat of Nicolo’s skin against his own chest. Nicolo is smooth-skinned and Yusuf’s hand almost slips in the leftover blood and streaming sweat when he reaches to get a better feel, fingers skipping from Nicolo’s shoulder to his stomach to his breast like they need to make sure they get a touch of every part. 

_ Patience, there’s plenty of time _ , he tells himself, and scrapes his nails across Nicolo’s upper chest--it’s Nicolo’s turn now to grunt, his breath hot in Yusuf’s mouth, and then--pleasant surprise--to turn them over so he’s on top now, to be the one pinning Yusuf down against the hot dusty track to the stream. “ _ Perfetto, perfetto _ ,” he’s muttering as he reaches under Yusuf’s shirt and almost pets the hair on his stomach, as he reaches lower and finds what he’s searching for.

Yusuf arches up, bites his earlobe and whispers himself, finds himself repeating  _ hayati, my life, _ as he grasps Nicolo with his own hand--it’s over very quickly then, in a haze of body heat and desert heat, wet mouths and desert dust. “ _ Hayati, hayati _ , Nicolo,” he gasps again as he comes; Nicolo has left words behind and merely shouts before he rolls off of Yusuf and turns his head to kiss him lazily again, another kiss that tastes of blood and sweat and dates.

Yusuf kisses him back, closes his eyes to see a vision of the future. In a moment, they will get up and wordlessly wash each other in the river; in a week they will steal horses and ride south because it’s the direction they happen to be facing; in a month they will in fact be hoarse from talking into the night. In a few hundred years he will kiss Nicolo and taste blood, and sweat, and dates.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] tear our pleasures with rough strife](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25785505) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




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